


Midnight Sun

by mautadite



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, F/F, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 12:57:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4706816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mautadite/pseuds/mautadite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her breath is icy, but the chill of it doesn’t bother Sansa. Starks were made for the cold.</p><p>(Vampire AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midnight Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an anon on tumblr who wanted vampire!Margaery/human!Sansa. While it’s not my trope of choice, I did get bitten (haha) with an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote it. Written pretty quickly; please forgive (and point out if you like) any typos.

It was something like an Other, Margaery says.

A cold, blighted creature, eyes ice blue and too beautiful to fathom. It had fallen upon their caravan on the journey north. Margaery had seen carnage enough in the south, Sansa knows, ice dragons in the sky; rotting bodies animated only by malice and dark magic and the cold, cold air; men dying in screams, in twisted steel, by the hands of their enemies and their own. She had seen so much, they both had, and at the end of the war, when Queen Daenerys exiles Margaery to the North, Sansa looks forward to it. They could put the past aside, start with a clean slate, know each other as women, fill in the ten year chasm between them.

She presses a finger to her lips. It has been ten years, but there are some things that are too precious, too indelible in the mind of the young girl that still breathes within her, to be forgotten. Time is no match for the memory of soft lips on her own, sweet breath to rival the flowers in the garden around them. The new Warden of the North receives the missive telling of the departure of the former queen from King’s Landing, and looks forward with a butterfly heart to the arrival of her caravan.

Months pass, but it never comes.

The convoy was spotted in White Harbour, and not since then.

The search parties go out, and come back empty handed.

The ravens croak and scream in the skies, and Sansa comes to hope that no news is good news. 

And then one crisp spring morning in the hour of the wolf, Margaery arrives at last. She stands without the gates of Winterfell, covered in hoarfrost and tiny icicles. By the time Sansa arrives, wrapped in furs with a hand clutching her heart, every guard has either his hand on his sword or an arrow notched and pointed at this ghost of Sansa’s youth. The chill clings to Margaery like a perfume, and yet she doesn’t shiver, not once. 

“It was something like an Other,” she says, voice deadly hoarse, looking Sansa square in the eyes. Hers are golden brown, just like Sansa remembers, but ringed all around with a line of icy blue. Margaery’s lips quirk sadly, and Sansa catches a glint of teeth. “You will have to invite me in, I’m afraid,” she adds.

*

The first bite is the last.

It comes months later, and Sansa invites her to take it. She knows she isn’t being fair. The low cut gowns, the impractical, neck-bearing furs, and Margaery is close, always leaning closer. It had been hard to swallow at first, this reality, but after the first few weeks of digesting, Sansa found her doubt and fear being eclipsed by a sisterly protectiveness, quite different from what she feels for Arya or Jon or Rickon. She wants to protect Margaery, both from the world and what she seems to think of herself.

Margaery doesn’t want to bite her, and Sansa shouldn’t want her to. She’s been subsisting on woodland creatures, the boar and elk that come close to the edge of the Wolfswood. The wolves themselves she won’t touch; though they aren’t quick enough to evade her, Margaery insists their blood is rank and foreign, inimical to the thing that had made her, and thus to Margaery herself. 

“Or it could be a way of signalling that the wolves are your friends,” Sansa says lightly, and that makes Margaery smirk, with the barest tinge of a cool blush. She remembers what that half-smile, half-grin looked like in the sunlight, all lit up with playfulness and the warmth of the roses around her. Memories are all she has now; Margaery won’t walk in the sun again.

Margaery doesn’t want to bite her. She speaks very little of that night, and the things the creature had done to make her, the months she’d spent travelling with it before slaying it. She assures Sansa that she can survive like this, and Sansa hears what isn’t said. She watches the foreign lines of blue around Margaery’s irises grow wider and wider in the days before she feeds, and then retract after she’s drunk her fill. Retract, but never fully disappear.

No one in the castle knows what she is, no one but Arya, Rickon and Jeyne. The servants and guards present at the time of her arrival are made to forget, with a drop of blood and a kindly suggestion. Sansa lets Jon and his sweet maester into the secret as well, and they come down off the Wall with a cartload of books and wary words.

“Silver,” Jon says, taking her aside during the day and pressing a small knife into her palm, “or a pointed stake from a branch of a heart tree.”

Sansa stares down at the knife. She has never seen anything sharper. 

“I cannot…”

“Promise me, Sansa,” Jon says with quiet urgency, his Stark eyes boring into hers. He’s seen things, she knows, things that even now he strives to protect their family and the rest of the realm from. Sansa promises, with a mute nod, slipping the knife into her boot. 

She knows she won’t be able to keep her word.

Margaery is dangerous. That is a story told with the simplest look at her body, the hardness of it, the quickness of her every movement, the ice petals that form on her brow if she stands in place too long. Sansa has seen her betimes after hunting, blood on her sweet arched lips and the thrill of it lighting up her skin. Her voice has hardened to a permanent grate, like frost on a rusty gate, and her eyes are full of ice. She isn’t human anymore.

But if this thing has changed Margaery then it has also changed Sansa to suit. She wants her, even more than the little girl who’d stood in the gardens in King’s Landing an age ago, marvelling at a singular rose.

Margaery doesn’t want to bite her, but one night, in the coolness of Sansa’s solar, she does. Sansa sits too close, and leans too close, and brushes Margaery’s silky brown hair off her shoulder. They are speaking of something, perhaps Margaery’s family, being kept at bay with letters that say little and less, or Arya, who disappears more and more each day as the land continues to thaw. Whatever the subject of conversation, it is swept away from Sansa’s throat when Margaery touches her, with a single finger. It’s like a gust of wind against her cheek.

“You’re so warm,” Margaery says, her voice like steel on stone. The alien lines of blue around her irises glint. “Please…”

And she makes to push her away. Desperate and not knowing why, Sansa presses nearer instead, and kisses her.

Margaery’s reaction is instantaneous. She sucks in a breath, deep and long and shuddery, and she seems to seep the warmth from Sansa’s bones, replacing them with a sharp, tingling pleasure, and Sansa only wants to get closer, closer, to chase the heat. She cups Margaery’s face and kisses her hard, hunting after the memory of their time in the sun. Margaery seems to remember; she wraps her arms around Sansa’s waist just as she’d done years ago, a rueful laughing puffing out of the corners of her mouth and caressing her cheek. Her breath is icy, but the chill of it doesn’t bother Sansa. Starks were made for the cold.

They kiss and kiss and kiss some more, the light of the moon urging them on, and when Sansa bares her neck and shrugs her shoulders back, Margaery’s eyes flash. Her gown is once again cut too low, and Margaery sweeps chilling kisses over the tops of her breasts before licking her way back up to her neck.

The cut of it comes quick, teeth sinking into her skin for a hot second only to be replaced by lips, closing over the wound and lapping up the blood. Sansa shudders, leaning back against the low chaise, feeling very lightheaded very suddenly, and not knowing whether to blame the blood loss or Margaery herself or both. It is a strange feeling; every sip of blood she loses is replaced with something else, a heady lightness, a creeping cold that swoops low and blooms into warmth in the pit of her stomach. Sansa moans, and then tries to curb the sound, startled by it. She brings up her hands, sinks them into Margaery’s arms. 

Nothing has ever felt so good. 

Margaery feeds, climbing over her and straddling her lap in her hunger, careful with every drop of blood. Sansa feels gemlike, precious.

When Margaery pulls back, her lips are smeared with red. She swallows a last time, sucks a finger into her mouth, and then rubs her saliva over Sansa’s neck. A curious thing to do, and Sansa resolves to ask her about it another time, when her heart is not blooming with lightness and wonder at what she sees. She reaches up to cup Margaery’s cheek, almost believing it to be a dream. Golden brown are her eyes, through and through, with no circlet of ice, and perhaps this is what Sansa has been searching for all along.

“You are so beautiful,” she says, thumbing Margaery’s cheek. Margaery captures the hand, and dots what must be a hundred kisses over her knuckles and palm. 

“You are more so.”

Sansa smiles, unable to stop drinking in the look of her. “Your eyes…”

“Yes. Please, Sansa,” she says, and her voice turns sharp behind the gravel of it. “Never again.”

Sansa nods. In her mind’s eye she holds the Margaery that will never be hers again, but she treasures this woman no less, with her teeming strength and overwhelming control and her humanity in the face of the monster that had birthed her. She understands now, if she never did, why this is so important to Margaery.

“Never again, unless you ask it of me,” she swears. And then, because she can’t help but be curious: “How did I taste?”

Margaery half laughs, half groans. “Better than anything I’ve ever put to my lips.”

Sansa laughs with her. “But you stopped.”

“For you, of course.”

They sit in a loose embrace for a few moments more, Sansa’s heart slowing back down to pace with her body, her breath coming back to her. Margaery’s eyes are fixed on her, and Sansa is helpless to do anything but look right back. Brown eyes have always been lovely to her, but never more so than now.

“You know that Winterfell is your home now, for as long as you would have it so,” she whispers, hugging her friend loosely. It had been so from the first, the invitation in the dark.

“I know,” Margaery replies, after a still moment. She presses her lips briefly to Sansa’s, and wintry air washes over her. “Thank you. I would ever have it so.”

*

Sansa sleeps most of the day now.

Most of her business is seen to in the mornings; she meets early with the castellan and Winterfell’s new maester, freshly anointed by the Conclave. She holds court in the Great Hall, listening to petitions and grievances. She hears the reports of the builders, the concerns of the farmers. In her spare moments she walks with Jeyne, watches Rickon spar, chats or squabbles with Arya, writes letters to Jon, sits in the godswood thinking of Robb and Bran and Mother and Father. 

An hour after midday finds her abed.

There’s a lot to get used to. Sansa learns to love the harshness of winter’s voice, as sweet as any music. She comes to see the blue of her own eyes in the encroaching cold that dances around a field of brown. The godswood comes over frequently with frost, and the crypts are filled with flowers. Sansa comes into her own as a Warden, growing her own wisdom, serving her queen. She thinks of a little girl who sat in a gilded cage in a red castle, and wishes she could tell her that there is life after pain, a future paved in steel, second chances at love.

In the crepuscule hours, Sansa feels cold lips on her ear and a hand on her waist, and she awakens like a winter rose blooming in the night air. She turns in Margaery’s cool arms, already smiling. It is no great sacrifice to sleep during the day when her sun only comes out at night.


End file.
